CONCEPT
The Common World
The shared reality that exists
between minds, constituted through joint attention—now evaporating as AI-driven personalization eliminates shared referents.
The common world, in Citton's framework (drawing on
Hannah Arendt), is the
intersubjective reality that multiple
minds inhabit together—not the physical world of objects but the
meaningful world of shared references, common concerns, and mutually intelligible symbols. It is the world in which strangers can converse because they attend to the same news, argue because they recognize the same problems, and coordinate because they operate within the same framework of cultural meaning. The common world is not given—it is
constructed, continuously and effortfully, through the practices and technologies that enable
joint attention. When
joint attention dissolves, the common world thins—becomes less substantial, less capable of supporting
the weight of democratic institutions, cultural production, and mutual understanding. The thinning is not a metaphor: it describes a measurable reduction in shared reference, a statistical decline in the probability that any two randomly selected members of a society have attended to the same content, and a corresponding increase in the incomprehension and distrust that arise when people realize they no longer inhabit the same informational reality.